We might find what our bureaucracies do, the hard way.
We might find what our bureaucracies do, the hard way.
When a matter has been deliberated on at great length, it can happen, even before deliberations have ended, that suddenly, like lightning, in some unforeseeable place, which cannot be located later on, a directive is issued that usually justly but nonetheless arbitrarily, brings the matter to a close.
-Franz Kafka, The Castle
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on the South Carolina State Board of Education for the Center for Educator Learning and Wellness, which you can read here. Whether you’re from South Carolina or not, I think the labyrinthine process by which state educational decisions are made here shed some light on why we should be carefully watching the incoming presidential administration as it vows to remake government bureaucracy in its own image.
Peter Greene, as usual, has a great piece in Forbes (“Will Trump Really End the Department of Education?”) that tackles how realistic (or not) Trump’s promise to abolish the federal Department of Education might be— but, more importantly, he explains what the Department does in the first place, which sheds light not only why some people would like to get rid of it, but also what our students and communities will lose if we do.
As I wrote after the election, I do really believe that government is purely an abstraction without people to give it power. And one of the more outlandish ideas behind Project 2025, as well as many of Trump’s own policy statements, is that somehow there are thousands of government bureaucrats just waiting in the wings to take over from the folks Trump and some of his advisors have promised to fire.
Bureaucracy, of course, has a bad name, and often deserves it. One reason I love reading Kafka is that he makes me feel less alone when I have to deal with the more absurd and byzantine parts of educational and policy bureaucracy, when the machine of organizational procedures and rules chews up and spits out soft human flesh.
But, as Greene explains, agencies like the Department of Education also serve roles that protect and benefit vulnerable people. That the pseudo-philosophy that government is always bad seems to mostly come from either acting government officials or people running for office should tell you a lot about what really drives them. That heads of state-level Departments of Education like Oklahoma’s Ryan Walters and my own state’s Ellen Weaver tend to loudly call for abolishing the federal DOE while also moving to broadly expand their own power tells you how sincere many of these “small government” arguments really are.
That the team preparing to enter the White House in January is made up of folks who openly want to use the power of government to aggressively push their own agenda and consolidate their own power confirms what you probably already know.